The humble Farmer at Bowdoin College, January 31, 2003
Thank you for visiting this page of Rants.
Below are the rants from The humble Farmer
radio show for the week of
April 8 - 14, 2007
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April 8, 2007 Rants
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1. And what is old? Is old a relative thing? My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is only 55. When I tell her that I’m a tired old man, she says, “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
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2. From time to time an editor who runs out of interesting story ideas asks me to write an article for a magazine. I don’t look for this kind of assignment because, unless you are Andy Rooney, writing for a magazine pays next to nothing. The only reason anyone in my league would write an article for a magazine is to get some colorful tearsheets. They can also say, “I just wrote an article for a magazine.” So I’ll say it: You might have read an article I wrote last fall for the University of Rochester Alumni magazine. It was about how one could make a positive difference in the lives of your friends by producing a music and humor show on public radio. It was a hard article to write because the editor sent me samples of the kind of writing he wanted. One article was written by an astronaut who had gone around the world in a rocket and the other article had already been published in Newsweek. You can understand that most any mortal would worry about coming up to that kind of expectations. All this comes to mind because I’ve been asked to write a story about the mean things Maine people say to tourists or year round summer people. And because this topic has been mined and undermined I am not likely to add much to the existing literature. Because the editor knew this, I was asked to get one story from Bob Marley and one story from Tim Sample. Bob Marley and Tim Sample are very famous people so I expect they will be very hard to contact. The difficulty one has in contacting a famous person increases exponentially with the amount of fame. A famous person has a battery of people who read and answer the email and answer the phone and keep that famous person from important work. This is why famous people have time to write books or do great and wonderful things. And now that we have delineated those parameters and pause to think about it, I’d appreciate any tips you might send me on what I have to do to become famous.
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3. This morning on one of those early morning tv shows, they talked about a program called the Sopranos. I had never heard of the Sopranos, which is not surprising. But what surprised me is that the show has been on for 10 years. Did I hear them correctly? Has this program I’ve never heard of been on TV for ten years? I look at tv. After 12 to 14 hours of answering emails on my computer I have to watch TV. I can’t understand how I could have missed the Sopranos --- unless it was on at the same time as Cops or Jerry Springer. You heard me say that I went to a humor convention in February where I met a man called Hitch. They made a movie about Hitch called Hitch. At the time Hitch said the person who starred in Hitch was Smith. And I had to ask my wife Marsha what Smith’s first name was. Will. Will Smith. Since that convention, I have seen Will Smith in a movie based on a book by Isaac Asimov. But, the thing that finally impressed Will Smith on my mind, so that I will recognize Will Smith the next time I see him, was an article I read in Newsweek magazine that said that Will Smith was a super star who had earned the movie companies 4 billion dollars in ticket sales. I suppose my question is, How many famous people are there out there that I’ve never heard of? Once you get by the really famous people like Bopp or Grimm or Pott or Chauncey Moorhouse or Miff Mole, I haven’t heard of anybody.
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4. You might remember that a while back I spoke about dooryard clutter. People who live in the richer northern European countries don’t collect scraps of plywood and old cars for parts. People who live in the poorest countries in Africa don’t collect clutter because their neighbors would steal it. This means that the only people who collect clutter are those who live in places like Maine where the socio economic situation of the average person is somewhere in between. Larry writes: “humble: I taught a boy from the Ukraine whose mother married a man from … ME. There are web sites devoted to this concept. Anyway, this boy had passable English although not idiomatic American so was at a great disadvantage in the class. However, he could fix any car you could name by scavenging parts and adapting them to the situation. He said that everyone in the Ukraine could do the same thing. This skill was not in great demand in affluent Readfield or Manchester, two of the towns sending students to Maranacook Community School. Except for the more rural parts of those towns, you'd never find any rusting cars driven out in a field or snuggled up to the barn. So, I'd buy the socio-economic thinking you mentioned: piles of what others call junk are what someone else who is talented at tinkering needs to get something running. I wish I had the skills of my student or at least that he'd be nearby when something of mine stops working. Larry
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5. Because I’ve been too drove up to think this week, I have been digging in my 1999 files, desperately trying to find something we can talk about here for a minute or so. What it brings to mind is that some jokes or stories that worked well years ago would have absolutely no social or cultural context to make them meaningful today. I know that I have had to abandon parts of my standup routine, just because people forgot who O. J. Simpson was. Here’s something I found that everyone would have understood in November or December of 1999. In 50 years nobody will understand what this means. Perhaps you might not even understand it now. One of my radio friends wrote, “Please take time out of your busy schedule to check your toilet paper stockpile. Make sure it's Y2K compliant. Experts caution that if it isn't, on January 1, 2000, it will roll back to 1900 and turn into a Sears and Roebuck catalog.
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6. I was over 50 years old when I attended my first French class. My wife Marsha, the Almost Perfect Woman, took this French class with me, and while driving home from the first class I told her I couldn’t remember the French word for money. She said, “I think it’s moolah.” I’m sorry that I didn’t study French 55 years ago because French is a very important language --- to the French. Every time I went to France I was frustrated because there isn’t a man, woman or child there who will speak a word of English. I can’t get a room in France, I can’t get anything to eat, I can’t find out where anything is. So I finally got around to learning French. The first thing our French teacher told us was that you don’t take no for an answer in France. If you come into a restaurant and say you want the table over by the window, and they say that it’s reserved for the President, you say I am the president, and you go over there and sit down. Our teacher said that French is a passionate language. Your sentences must go up, Jay swaff, and up jay swaff --- mongey, mein herr, like that. You must not mumble: lights please, someone, please turn on the lights. Does it really matter what you say in France if you’re simply going to go over and sit at the president’s table anyway? Our teacher told us that the sounds in French are wonderful. But after studying French for years I can tell now tell you that there is only one sound in French. It is a nasal sound. Difference in meaning is conveyed by the way you wave your arms.
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7. Over the past 25 or so years I might have heard the Garrison Keillor radio program half a dozen times. I enjoyed it when I heard it. I did go to see the Garrison Keillor movie, and I enjoyed that. I suppose the reason that I haven’t heard the program more is because I don’t have time to listen to the radio. When I’m going anywhere in my truck, I listen to language tapes in any of half a dozen different languages. For years I remember that I tried not to listen to Garrison Keillor for fear of having it influence the content of my own radio program. But now I realize that was silly because over the past 29 or so years we have each developed our own style. The only thing we have in common is that people are likely to laugh at something we say. But --- my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, splurged and got a book of Andy Rooney’s essays at a lawn sale for a quarter. I’ve been reading Andy Rooney and can see that my writing could be influenced by that. Years ago I read Andy Rooney and I didn’t think he was funny. But after years of watching him on TV, it is my belief that he is right on the money. It is a fact that some people are better in print than they are on their feet. But now, as someone who has both written for newspapers and delivered commentary on TV for years, although Andy Rooney’s audience rightfully contains several million more people than mine, it is my humble professional opinion that he is a master at both. While reading Andy Rooney’s articles I saw many things that I though I had already said. We both write about very common, everyday things that captured our attention. Is it possible that two old men could select the same common topics and arrive at the same conclusions? I would suggest that it is possible and that I have not knowingly delivered up to you someone else’s work as my own. Because when I copy something out of the encyclopedia or anywhere else to read for you I make a point of saying so.
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8. You might have heard that my wife and I spent the month of March in Fort Myers, Florida. I would not wish Fort Myers in March on anyone and I do not plan to do it again, because the smoke from all the fires was so bad that I couldn’t even go outside to ride my bicycle. Unless you go down on the keys, The Sunshine State is one of the greatest misnomers ever perpetuated by a chamber of commerce. You don’t even hear anything about the smoke from all the fires on TV, probably because it would be bad for the tourist business. People who live in Fort Myers claim they don’t even notice the smoke. Like a woman who lives with a man who never bathes, there are some things you don’t notice after a while.
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9. Along towards the end of March when it is 86 degrees in Fort Myers, Florida, it is too hot for people who don’t wear any kind of hat while driving a boat in the middle of Tenants Harbor in February. And from these people you are very likely to hear a wail and a cry, “I want to go home. It is too hot. I can’t sleep nights. It’s too hot. I want to go home.” But when you look at your computer, you learn that it will be snowing in Maine for the next few days and it would be much better to cough in the Florida smoke for an extra week rather than to unload the car in a Maine blizzard. But the cry persists, “I want to go home. It’s too hot.” We are not talking here about something that can be resolved by logic or reason or mathematical symbols on a piece of paper. People who can’t stand the heat have an argument that transcends argument so we put the roof rack on the Rav 4, loaded the car to the gunnels, and headed north for Maine.
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10. How do you know when the honeymoon is over? What made you realize that you had been married a long, long time? This morning when I woke up, before I could even groan and get my eyes open, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, whispered in my ear, “Will you put the windows back in so I can finish painting them?”
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Thank you for reading my rants. Come have supper with us at the St. George farm when it gets warm enough to travel. Your buddy humble
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
(207) 226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
www.TheHumbleFarmer.com
© 2007 Robert Karl Skoglund